The present invention relates to a data input/output system for an application system in numerical control equipment.
A maker who manufactures and sells numerically-controlled machine tools usually implements them by combining machine tools of their own making with numerical control equipment developed and manufactured by a numerical control equipment maker. In this case, since the numerical control equipment is not specially designed to be applicable only to a certain type of machine tool, but is applicable to various types of machine tools, it is difficult for the numerically-controlled machine tool maker to exhibit their own characteristic feature in functional parts of the numerical control equipment of the numerically-controlled machine tool built by themselves. Their own features are limited specifically to functional parts of the machine tools. For this reason, there has been a strong demand for development of numerical control equipment of the type that will permit the numerically-controlled machine tool maker to easily present their characteristic features in the functional parts of the numerical control equipment.
FIG. 1 is a functional block diagram of numerical control equipment proposed to meet the above demand, in which an application system AS is added to a part equivalent to conventional numerical control equipment NC. This application system ranks with the NC in an NC machine tool system in terms of the priority for software execution, and permits the machine tool maker to prepare, by themselves, some of the NC functions such as sequence control between the NC and the machine tool, conversion of input data, control of an MDI (Manual Data Input device) and a CRT, etc.
Incidentally, the application system AS is formed, in practice, by a processor system comprising a processor, a memory and so forth. Accordingly, its operation is defined by a program stored in the memory. Therefore, it is desired that it is possible to input the program into the application system AS and, conversely, to read out the program for output.